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The Last American Hero

Attempting to confront the sudden ripening threat of a transnational terrorist haven in Iraq, President Obama has once again turning to his most blunt instrument, the special operations forces commanded by Adm. William H. McRaven, to restore order.

No air strikes (yet). No new invasion. No headlines. Just a tiny contingent of America’s best, placed once again in harm’s way and tasked with singlehandedly defending the national interest.

Three hundred special operators will deploy, bringing with them efficient, advanced insurgent tracking technology and tactics that McRaven’s forces use in more than 70 countries today. Don’t let the “training” description of the mission fool you. These forces are intelligence enablers. They are, in the parlance of the military, effects multipliers.

In August, McRaven will likely finish his three-year rotation at Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and will probably retire shortly after. He won’t be getting any ticker-tape parades, and most people will have forgotten his name. But perhaps he, more than anyone, qualifies as America’s last four-star hero—this generation’s Patton, or MacArthur, or Eisenhower, a transformational leader in a tumultuous time.

The mammoth special operations enterprise he helped build over the past decade or so has become an unqualified success—maybe the only part of the American foreign-policy machine that deserves the laurel. In the public eye, special operations forces, or SOF, remain cool, associated with just killing bad guys, and not at all with virtually every other ambiguous Obama administration policy tool that seems to be coming apart. In an era when nothing seems to work, SOF does.

Beyond that, SOF seems in tune both with the times we live in and the president who serves them. Special ops is known for mounting highly skilled, small-footprint actions and, to Barack Obama’s delight, never allowing an inch of “mission creep.”

Bill McRaven is the one who, more than any other modern four-star, made all this possible. The best known of America’s most able field commanders in recent years, perhaps, were Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whom military historians will probably rank as among the most innovative officers of their day, relegating to footnotes the relatively minor scandals that felled them. At various points, both were built up as heroes in the press, particularly when politicians needed to marshal public support for difficult missions, like the surge in Iraq.

But it’s McRaven who fits the mold of a true military hero. His record remains unblemished by personal scandal. His personal story is compelling, even quirky. He majored in journalism at the University of Texas, inspired by the muckraking of Woodward and Bernstein, whose work led to a corrupt president’s resignation when McRaven was a junior. In person, McRaven looks a little like Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show—if Scarborough, a former congressman, had endured P90X training every day of his life. McRaven spent the 1980s as an elite member of various SEAL teams, eventually winding up as a squadron commander for a top maritime counterterrorism unit, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, better known as SEAL Team Six. He made his career there and became a legendary officer for reasons that remain opaque to those outside the SEAL fraternity today. A 2004 Newsweekarticle recounts a vague story about how he once stood up to the fearsome Dick Marcinko, then the SEAL Team Six leader, who had ordered him to do “some questionable activities.” One of McRaven’s former colleagues told me that the “activities” in question were lethal and they involved potential collateral damage during a domestic counterterrorism exercise. (Neither McRaven nor his spokespeople would ever confirm this when I asked them about it, but it rings true.)

On Sept. 11, 2001, McRaven was recovering at home in Southern California from a freak parachute accident that had nearly killed him four months earlier, crushing his back and pelvis. He stands ramrod straight today because there is real metal holding together his bones. After a 2003 tour at the National Security Council’s Office of Combating Terrorism, he commanded the Joint Special Operations Command’s classified deployment in Iraq—Task Force 121—capturing high-value targets (think Saddam Hussein) and fighting Iranian proxies. He succeeded McChrystal as JSOC’s commanding general, and then, three years ago, took his fourth star and final promotion.

Marc Ambinder, a contributing editor at The Week, The Atlantic and GQ, is working on a book about nuclear war scares.